{"id":1933,"date":"2006-08-01T21:43:54","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T21:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-1933.html"},"modified":"2006-12-30T17:09:02","modified_gmt":"2006-12-30T17:09:02","slug":"the-machinist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/2006\/08\/01\/the-machinist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Machinist<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the first ten minutes or so I found it hard to see past Christian Bale’s radical physical transformation into a horrifyingly emaciated stick figure. I had heard about him losing an enormous amount of weight for this role, but I didn’t realize just how far<\/em> he had gone.<\/p>\n

In the film, he plays Trevor Reznik, a factory machinist who is losing his mind. This is the cause of his weight loss. He hasn’t slept in a year, and has developed obsessive-compulsive cleaning behaviours. At work, his concentration is shot, and he is starting to see things. Or is he? <\/p>\n

The story follows Reznik as he struggles to come to terms with a reality that is fragmenting around him, and lies squarely in the territory covered before by films like Jacob’s Ladder<\/i>, Memento<\/i> and Fight Club<\/i>. It deals with the layers of (un)reality in a much more “arty” way, though: the direction and cinematography is beautifully sparse, but quite self-consciously so. The twist at the end is predictable, but still satisfying. It’s a movie for the mind, rather than for the heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the first ten minutes or so I found it hard to see past Christian Bale’s radical physical transformation into a horrifyingly emaciated stick figure. I had heard about him losing an enormous amount of weight for this role, but I didn’t realize just how far he had gone. In the film, he plays Trevor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[1142],"class_list":["post-1933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films_3_stars","tag-legendshome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}